Gerald Warner is an author, broadcaster, columnist and polemical commentator who writes about politics, religion, history, culture and society in general.

DaveWatch: Vichy Tory lead will rise from six points, but the trend is relentlessly downward

Cameron's Conservatives have a six-point lead over Labour (Photo: Rii Schroer)

Unease, to put it mildly, in Wisteria Mansions as the Vichy regime-in-waiting sees its poll lead over Labour fall to six points (ie 31 seats short of a majority and just 10 seats short of an outright victory for Gordon). When one recalls that in mid-2008 Dave was 25 points ahead, it is a striking tribute to Cast Iron’s effortless anti-charisma that he has managed to demolish such an advantage.

Could it possibly be – and I advance this hypothesis only very tentatively – that there is some market resistance to Dave’s exciting new product: a Tory-free Tory Party? In fact, as any experienced poll-watcher knows, Dave’s lead will bob upward again, provoking an immense sigh of relief in the gang hut, where the members of Pop can get back to allocating ministries to themselves.

Yet that relief will be unfounded. What counts in opinion polls is not the daily or weekly game of Snakes and Ladders ("Gordon throws mobile telephone at Mandy, go up three points…" "George Osborne pledges swingeing cuts in 2025, go down two points…"), but the long-term trend. For Dave, as the decline from 25 to six points over 18 months illustrates, the trend is relentlessly downward. That is the enduring danger for Dave and the Maudernisers.

Another danger for them is their inexperience in political bare-knuckle fighting. Dave has called for Sir Philip Mawer, who is in charge of enforcing the ministerial code, to investigate allegations of bullying in Number 10. That is a mistake. Dave should have stood back from the controversy, refused to comment on unproved allegations and let the media go to town on Gordon. Instead, he has polarised the issue by politicising it.

With calls already being made for the resignation of the head of the National Bullying Helpline, who made the claims, on the grounds of breach of confidentiality, and journalists interesting themselves in the fact that the charity’s leading patron is Ann Widdecombe and that it carries a message from Dave on its website, there was already some risk that this controversy, after savaging Gordon, could turn round and bite Dave in the derrière. Even Conservative activists will be startled by the emergence of Dave, who has bullied constituency associations up and down the land into accepting his politically correct clones as candidates, as champion of the anti-bullying cause.

It was unwise of Dave to turn his election campaign into a war of personality politics when he himself is not equipped with anything that could objectively be called a personality. Whatever the ebb and flow of party skirmishing, the underlying reality is that the public has now largely got the measure of Dave and is unenthused by what it sees, while he is detested by his own party to a degree it has not experienced since his fellow Euro-traitor Edward Heath. Like Heath, he may still scrape into office; after that – well, Grocer Heath wrote the script.